May 2012
3 posts
Punkademics! →
“In the face of a hidden power which is channelled through information,...”
– Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes
April 2012
8 posts
“The class structure of the virtual world is not a reproduction of the class...”
– Christian Fuchs, Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet
“Russians called these last years of Brezhnev the years of stagnation. And I sort...”
– Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Adam Curtis
How to Hide from Machines →
March 2012
1 post
BEZNA #2 Apocalypse & Protest, March 2012 →
February 2012
9 posts
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“The Uncanny Algorithm is a trading algorithm. One that is currently in stage 1,...”
– Uncanny algorithms and superstitious bankers
Empiricism as rape phantasy
In a passage adressed to his monarch, [Francis] Bacon uses bold sexual imagery to explain key features of the experimental method as the inquisition of nature:
“For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. … Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and...
“Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately...”
– David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
January 2012
6 posts
One Nation Under Tesco
Reading this excellent, and quite exhaustive, analysis of the British zustände I came across this wonderful observation:
In August, in the Pembury Estate in Hackney, one person climbed the lamppost to disconnect the CCTV cameras. After clambering up, he found himself without the right tools to do the job. In a moment reflecting Banksy’s ‘Salute to the Tesco shopping bag’...
“Nothing comes without its world, so trying to know these worlds is crucial.”
– Donna Haraway
Sometimes - like, now - when I feel stuck in the thicket of poststructuralist gobbledygook, it really helps to return to these sobering sentences of the always brilliant David Graeber:
Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula...
re: carebots. You are the monkey.
5 tags
This little episode neatly illustrates the problem with robotics and artificial intelligence research. At a conference, a medical diagnostic system with voice recognition and built-in emotional response was presented:
When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.” A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system...
December 2011
8 posts
“To move in an ethical direction, from a Spinozan point of view, is not to attach...”
– Brian Massumi, Navigating Movements
“Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against...”
– Darwin Among the Machines (1863)
Langdon Winner FTW:
Much of what now passes for incisive analysis is actually nothing more than elaborate landscape, impressionistic, futuristic razzle-dazzle spewing forth in an endless stream of paperback non-books, media extravaganzas, and global village publicity. … The Postindustrial Society? The Technetronic Society? The Posthistoric Society? The Active Society? In an unconscious...
Selma James: Our Time Is Coming (1971) →
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This is hilarious:
The “Craigslist robber” offers a minor but illustrative example of obfuscation as a practice turned to criminal ends. At 11 AM on Tuesday, 30 September 2008, a man dressed like an exterminator in a blue shirt, goggles and a dust mask, and carrying a spray pump, approached an armored car parked outside a bank in Monroe, Washington, incapacitated the guard with pepper...
The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines →
via lf
November 2011
6 posts
“At the most abstract level, the key political battle of the 21st century may not...”
– Sandra Braman
Ammer & Console: Heimat und Technik. Das...
100 years of aerial bombing: The conference. The visual (deep) history in two parts.
Counter-mapping (in) the control society
I will give a short lecture on locative media, mapping and control at Tracing Mobility (27 Nov) in Berlin:
Mapping practices of locative media artists often promised more democratic representations of space. Consequently, participatory and networked modes of mapping spatial mobility, affective experience and subjective meaning were employed by a range of artists and activists. However, the...
October 2011
6 posts
Brian Winston Reads the TV News (1983) →
Vernetzte Kreativsubjekte: Zur gegenkulturellen... →
Wie konnten die Techniken medialer Vernetzung, mithin der Computer, nicht nur zum unverzichtbaren Attribut, sondern gleichsam zum Garanten der gegenwärtigen Subjektivierungsweise werden? Wo trafen sich die Wünsche nach expressiver Individualität und Selbstorganisation des neuen Kreativsubjekts mit der Rechenmaschine?
3 tags
Raymond Williams on media determinism. As true in 2011 as it was in 1973:
If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he (sic) may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself.
It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the ‘media-men’ of the...
Gerald Raunig on the polyvocal mediation of the ‘people’s microphone’:
In the case of #occupy wallstreet, the tendency to radical inclusion is evident primarily in the invention and development of general assemblies. These are not so much “general assemblies” in the conventional sense, but rather transversal assemblages of singularities, which renew the grassroots-democratic...
September 2011
9 posts
“If Modernity, or Modernism, is our Antiquity, then its ruins have become every...”
–
Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism
Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1983) →
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